A summary of all the things happening in the OpenStreetMap world

(English) weekly 281

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12/1/2015-12/7/2015

Pioneer Mapstyle harks back to the days of pioneering railroad constructions [1]

Matias Dahl has analysed the history of OSM data and noticed some interesting patterns on the change in the amenity tag. It also includes some pretty cool graphs.

Since December 3rd was International Day of Persons with Disabilities, Heise On-line reported about the recent developments in the wheelmap.org map. This OSM-based map allows users to add PoIs and to score them for wheelchair accessibility using a simple (“traffic light”) scale.

Nikhilprabhakar’s OSM diary provides a fairly detailed description of how Mapbox have been working to improve the completeness of the road network in India. Also invites the OpenStreetMap India community to help in improving the road network coverage.

A Mapzen blog encourages us to improve the awesomeness of OSM data by naming the un-named segments of roads. A tool is provided to help you locate the roads in your city that needs to be named.

A really great and funny idea is an OSM Advent Calendar. The automatic translation is really bad, but weeklyOSM thinks that you can get the idea and it would be great to initiate it next year in several languages. 😉

Haserbaba describes some problems he had (and cartographers before him) to properly map a zoo in Moscow.

Joost Schouppe puts together some statistics on the Belgian mapping community.

User SK53 evaluates the mapping of the Townlands in Northern Ireland by comparing OSM data with recently-released official open boundaries data. He estimates that not more than 1% of the OSM data needs to be corrected.

Events

A Missing Maps Mapathon is being organized in Lyon on Friday 18th December to introduce OSM and HOT to new mappers.

In the official blog of the OpenStreetMap Foundation the date for the State of the Map 2016 is announced. It will take place at the Free University of Brussels from 23 to 25 September. The event has already a website.

Humanitarian OSM

Dermot McNally, an Epic Mapper from Ireland writes about how to find “the next generation of mappers”.

The annual north-east monsoon that hit Chennai this November/December, led to massive flooding. More than 300 people were killed and 1.8 million fleeing the floods. The OSM community brought a flood map online. User pratikyadav asks for help to map, particularly the outskirts of Chennai. The task can be found here.

dekstop’s OSM diary provides an interesting perspective on what provides satisfaction and motivation for various mappers. Specifically he suggests that HOT volunteers get “secondary benefits” from participation, for example from their social experiences.

Maps

Pioneer is the second in a series of new map styles now available on Thunderforest (the first in series, Spinal Map, is described here). These styles, designed by Richard Fairhurst, for Andy Allen’s Thunderfrost project harks back to the days of pioneering railroad construction in the American West.

Wikimaps have published a project proposal which aims to make collecting and displaying historical geographic data fun and easy for everyone. Old maps, images, historical data and common visualization techniques together will allow historical phenomena to be illustrated in Wikipedia. The project is collaborating with Open Historical Map.

v2.37.0 of the OpenStreetMap-carto stylesheet was released on 1st of Dec and rolled out to the openstreetmap.org servers. Within a couple of days all tiles should show the new rendering. Full details of the new commit are provided here.

Did you know …

Other “geo” things

Chronas is a history project linking Wikipedia to a dynamic map with a time slider. You can watch a youtube demo here.

In an open letter Mapzen CEO, Randy Meech, asks Audi, BMW and Dailmer to consider opening HERE data and also to enable user editing of the data. Matt Amos explains why he feels that the proposal is not particularly constructive.

GPS Business News spoke with the head of sales at Navmii during WhereCamp. The interview with the representative of Navmii ( claims to be the provider of the first smartphone navigation based on OSM data) is about their prospects for 2016.

A Google mapper is annoyed and frustrated with the difficult process of mapping a new freeway interchange using Google Mapping tools. He points out that (at the time of writing) OSM had “nailed” this interchange and Google Maps were a long way behind.